Heinrich Hoerle: Worker
(Self-Portrait in Front of Trees and Chimneys)
Arbeiter (Selbstbildnis vor Bäumen und Schornsteinen) (1931)

"Justice, like freedom, stands on firmer premises than the dubious."

Never before in all history has a presidency attempted to administer upon such dubious premises. I could label this the Dubiety Presidency. Each proclamation has been justified by citing some obscure ruling obviously used out of its original context. An insistence that our present condition legally puts us on a war footing, for instance. Congress might tolerate these imaginings, but so far, the courts, as has always been their purpose, have remained dubious. They call a questionable justification into question. They question baseless accusations. They restore a much-needed sense of reason to the proceedings. The fever dream that always was MAGA was never based on anything even distantly resembling reason or fact. It was impure emotion packaged as if it might qualify as justification when it wasn't, and it couldn't succeed. The vagaries of our system allow an incumbent certain latitude. He can act first, knowing he'll only be questioned later. Later, he will have already effected some change, inflicted genuine damage. Then his act becomes something in need of reclaimation. Employees, acting in good faith, follow his directives only to become complicit in some grave miscarriages once the courts find against the incumbent again.

It's become a pattern now. We can be certain that this pattern will continue until the list of impeachable offenses approaches infinity. He might have thought he'd outsmarted all those opponents who insisted he could never successfully topple democracy. His strategy, if it could even be called a strategy, utterly relied on doubt and a certain naiveté on the part of the public. It required fools to be born at a greater rate than one per minute and honest citizens to tolerate a certain level of larceny, for he would steal the country the old-fashioned, fraudulent way. He'd deliberately break laws written to prevent anyone from undermining the rule of law. He promoted a rule by lawlessness instead, and his partisans cheered whenever he sinned, having been convinced that his was the lesser of sins. To his mind, nobody acting to save their country could ever sin, regardless of what they committed in that process. This defined lawlessness and forms the foundation of his administration's Dubiety.

Dubiety is how someone destroys a country. This is why our judiciary remains professionally skeptical. They seek precedent. They want to understand why the usual and customary means were not at least attempted before resorting to some radical, nonsensical approach. They ask how an end might be reasonably accomplished before agreeing that a policy might make sense. Judges expect explanations and will not accept assertions as reasonable replacements. The crisis our incumbent imagined cannot be logically explained. No, our borders were never under attack, nor were they ever open. Those millions of murdering illegal immigrants he described never existed. His agents are frantically arresting anyone with brown skin to cover his embarrassment. There will never be any reasonable explanation for any of this abomination. We remain a nation of laws, regardless of how many of them an incumbent decides to violate. His attempts to weaponize our government against us will render him, at best, a laughingstock.

The Big Lie betrays an even bigger Dubiety. It might serve as no more than a source of initial propulsion, but it loses inertia the further it flies and must ultimately be jettisoned once it costs more energy than it can return. Big Lies burn up and cannot be recovered. Their underlying Dubiety betrays their purpose. They cannot maintain momentum once they are questioned. The skeptics preserve unions much better than do the true believers. Those for whom Dubiety never registers might be effective shills, but they cannot become the foundation for much of anything beyond disruption. Disruption does not sustain itself. It cannot sustain anything but its own eventual annihilation. It might be the easiest means for getting something started, but at the sure and certain cost of proving itself unable to finish whatever it began. A positive vision might never come true, but it at least holds some element that contributes to its fruition. Dubiety paradoxically seems to demand a justice that might undermine itself. It seems to ache for clarity and reconciliation. Justice, like freedom, stands on firmer premises than the dubious.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz